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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Imogen Heap recently released her new album Sparks, and it's really really good! This song's Indian themes make it pretty good for Avatar World here, but just check out the whole thing. It's great.

So on to the main thing! AVATAR WORLD DRAFT v1.5!! I've been working on this pretty much nonstop for the past two weeks, and I'm pretty much incredibly happy with it. Here's what I wrote for the draft notes:
~ The entire layout and text got a makeover! In addition to just looking better and being written more clearly, it's also full of art! I'll be honest: there are a few pieces that are in there just because I didn't want to leave the spot blank (and so will be replaced later) but some of it is for real.~ The Player Tag system replaces Harm, and Armor is revamped to match! I haven't played with this yet, but it draws on ideas that several groups produced after playtests, and it feels pretty good to me. Much more fictional and it solves my PvP problem! Also on a Tag note, the Basic Moves had a bit of modification to make when-to-place-Tags a little more obvious. Specifically, Speak Honorably can now place Tags, which makes using Chi in social situations much easier.~ Sub-playbooks are now in the book! Including one I debated whether to put in or not, but decided to go for it: The Avatar. Honestly I think I did a pretty good job with what could otherwise have been a very overpowered concept.Some of the sub-playbook stuff is also very last-minute, so fair warning. Still, that stuff will get less play than almost anything else in the book.~ There's a second Quickstart in there! While I really like The Red Mountain, its tone is a bit more serious and mystical and can trend away from the more social moves in the game. To complement that, The Festival of the Four is touched with whimsy and the lighter tone that many get from the show, while also being more social-focused rather than exploration-focused.

In general, I feel really good about almost everything in this draft. All the big things that have concerned me at all in playtests have been addressed, so all that remains is refinement. I intend to make the next revision the final one, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if you're interested in playing Avatar World and are at PAX Prime this weekend, I will be running either it or Monsterhearts during my Games On Demand slots Saturday 6pm-10pm, Sunday 6pm-10pm, and Monday 10am-2pm.

Friday, August 22, 2014

This song has nothing to do with game, but as I already shared Connor Linning's work on the game I figured I'll share music I'm enjoying a lot from a different indie game, Electronic Super Joy: Groove City! I love this song, and the whole soundtrack. EnV did a great job.

The Logbook Project (tLBP): So let's start simple: who are you and what is your role in the Elysian Shadows team? I'm interested in general information as well as your history with regard to art, and specifically pixel art.What sort of programs do you use for making the assets for the game?Leandro Tokarevski (LT): My name is Leandro Tokarevski, I'm a pixel and concept artist for Elysian shadows, as well as a level designer. I'm half Italian and Half Russian, I was born in Rome, and now live mostly in St Petersburg, Russia. I've always loved drawing and painting, when I was 11 I entered an evening art school and then went on to entering the academy of arts of St. Petersburg, I'm about to start my fifth year studying architecture. Despite drawing for so many years, I've only relatively recently delved into pixel art, Elysian Shadows is my first real pixel art project. It's been an interesting experience, learning the specifics, but I found that most of the techniques used in traditional art were just as valid in pixel art, so it wasn't hard to adapt. I use GraphicsGale, Adobe Photoshop, and more recently Spritelamp. I find GraphicsGale is the best program for more old-school pixel art and animations, but ES has ventured so far from the classical 16-bit RPGs it was inspired by in terms of visuals, and gameplay for that matter, that its features are simply insufficient for our game. The addition of Spritelamp really helped develop ES's visual style, I'm still figuring out some of the details, but I'm pretty sure that with the help of Photoshop and Spritelamp We'll develop an atmospheric and unique art style. We're really doing things nobody really did on such a massive scale with pixel art.tLBP: I absolutely agree that traditional art techniques are often just as useful to pixel art. When I'm working with pixel artists almost half of what I talk about is more fundamental general art concepts, with the other half being specific pixel-art techniques. I also agree about GraphicsGale's excellence as a program for standard pixel art - I don't use it personally, but along with Pro Motion it's the most robust pixelling program I know of. It's really interesting that ES is unique enough that GG wasn't enough. Having watched the video about SpriteLamp Patryk put out a few days ago though I can totally see how unlike anything else SpriteLamp is. It's a great piece of unexplored technology that I underestimated originally.

tLBP: Can you tell me something about how the process works between you and with the rest of the members of the team?LT: I usually am given to design and draw an entire area of the game at the same time, along with all of its enemies, the architecture of the towns and dungeons, so everything in it is consistent and the designs are similar and work with each other. The team has a huge (and secret) design document in which all of the lore, characters, and environments are described, so before creating any assets I go there and read what exactly the area of the game is about. After that as long as I stay true to what's in the design doc, I have pretty much carte blanche, and can invent pretty much anything. We have a team chat on Skype, in which we discuss all of our ideas and suggestions. Once an idea is approved, I can go ahead and draw it out in pixel art. Sometimes, when the team chat is not enough, we have a team hangout where we brainstorm ideas and figure stuff out. It needs to be planned in advance, because we're all in different time zones. It isn't uncommon for us to have a hangout when for someone it's 4am.

tLBP: I don't have experience with pixelling for game development, but I always hear about how restrictive the time crunch can be in creating the art. How much time do you reasonably take on a single asset (a background, a character and their animations, whatever)? Are you often forced to work with the first draft of a piece or do you get much chance to go and revise before moving on?LT: It's only me and Patryk creating assets for ES, and the amount of stuff that needs to be drawn is sometimes overwhelming. Most times when creating a tilesheet or a sprite we skip the concept art stage entirely and start drawing pixel art right away, speeding up the process. This sometimes backfires, however, if there's a miscommunication between team members during the discussion phase, and sometimes we end up repixelling something we spent a lot of time into. After the kickstarter we'll finally have enough time to draw concept art first, and then go into the pixel art. I'd say on average a tilesheet for an environment of the game will take about 15-20 hours to complete, it varies from area to area, though. Same with sprites, it depends on the kind of creature. A stone golem will take less time to animate then a living breathing creature. The time crunch was particularly restrictive on the last weeks before the kickstarter campaign launched. So much work needed to be done, that there was barely any time for discussion. Now the pace of work has slowed down a bit, thankfully.tLBP: I don't have a metric for if 15-20 hours really is a huge amount in game develoment, but it certainly sounds like a lot! Glad that the pace is starting to slow a bit though, seeing more refinement will be really cool.

tLBP: How indicative of the game's look are the Kickstarter photos? I gather that the asset quality will continue to be upgraded, but is there anything style-wise thatyou think will change from the current look?LT: I'd say the kickstarter screenshots are barely representative at all at this point of how the game is going to look like when finished. Since we decided to use Spritelamp and to draw normal maps by hand, our process for creating pixel art has changed completely. We no longer have to put shadows on to sprites and tiles themselves, we draw a normal map that when implemented in the game will create lights and shadows automatically. This is such a fundamentally different and new approach of creating pixel art, that we'll have to redraw and rework every single asset we currently have, so I'll say that 99% of what you see on the kickstarter page will look different in the actual game. Actually no, make it 100%.tLBP: Wow! So the general aesthetic (perspective, etc) will be pretty similar but everything will be redrawn using Sprite Lamp's normal mapping? I'm really excited to see hwo the areas start looking when you get whole regions fully built with the normal maps, I bet that'll be really impressive.

tLBP: A big change to the way pixel art works in games comes from the lighting engine the game will be using, SpriteLamp. Can you tell me something about how that technology works and how it changes the creation of art assets?In my own experience, a consistent lightsource is an important part of making a pixel piece seem cohesive. How do you make the base art that SpriteLamp will then work on while still trying to produce good assets on their own?LT: When we first experimented with Spritelamp, creating up to 5 lighting profiles for every single asset, first of all it took way to much time, it would become impossible for us to ever finish all of the artwork for ES, and secondly the normal maps that it created weren't even that accurate and looked off most of the time. Patryk then had the idea of drawing all of the normal maps directly by hand. He explained to me how it would work, and it just made sense. We would start by drawing a diffuse map, basically a drawing without any shadows, where the light comes from every angle. Then, we would draw a normal map by hand in Photoshop, so that it would look exactly the way we want it. Then if needed we would draw depth maps and ambient occlusion maps, and feed it all into Spritelamp. The results are fantastic, and it doesn't take that much more time than drawing traditional pixel art. It's sometimes even quicker. When a dynamic light hits an object it comes to life, it looks three-dimensional, and exactly the way we want it to look, while still looking like pixel art, since we can regulate how many shades the dynamic light will be divided into when it hits the object. 5 seems to work best. As far as I know nobody ever used such a method of drawing pixel art, I'm sure we'll learn more along the way on how to perfect it, but even now we already fixed basically all of the issues traditional pixel art had with dynamic lighting.tLBP: One of my initial concerns with using SpriteLamp was that the outputted normal maps on Sprite Lamp's own Kickstarter page looked pretty unimpressive to me, but manually creating the normal maps has seemed to really show the true power of the program, as shown in some of your recent content. Being able to regulate the shades is interesting too, I didn't know you had that control. Did having more shades just not hold enough of that "pixel art" look or something? It's also really interesting that it's not any slower to do it this way. I'll have to try it sometime!

tLBP: The game is going to be run on a variety of systems. SpriteLamp is native to Windows, and has plans to work with Mac and Linux, but are there special considerations you need to accommodate for it to function on Dreamcast/Android/iOS? Should you reach the Xbox One/PS4/Wii U stretch goals I'd imagine those consoles are strong enough to handle it, but the relative power of the mobile OSs seems like it'd be an obstacle.LT: That's not really my area of expertise, but from what I heard from Falco, the Dreamcast is just about capable of handling what we create with Spritelamp. I really hope the programmers will find a way to implement the light engine on all of our platforms, I really don't know if that's possible and what it would entail.tLBP: Patryk was confident that the systems were more than capable of handling it, which is very exciting.

tLBP: Still on the topic of the other operating systems, are you doing anything special to make it look great both at the small resolutions of mobile units as well as on large monitors or televisions with the PC/Mac/Linux/Dreamcast? Will it be a matter of scaling the assets, or some other solution?LT: The resolution of the game right now is 720p. I would personally prefer it to be a little lower resolution, because right now the character sprites are really small on screen, and sometimes we show a little too much of the map at the same time. The pixel art suffers a little too, making the grid-like patterns of the tiles more apparent, but I digress. We'll scale all of the assets to match 720p, or whatever resolution we decide on. It just doesn't make sense to make a full HD pixel art game. It's better to just zoom in. Pixel art looks better zoomed in anyway. :)tLBP: I agree in a lot of cases about zoomed-in pixel art. And full 720p doesn't actually add that much precision to pixel art. Especially if emphasizing the pixel-art look is the goal, a bit lower might be preferable. As you've said though, ES's pixel art isn't quite like any other pixel art, so it'll be interesting to see how it behaves.

tLBP: This is a long ways out, but about the Next-Gen+ stretch goal: will that high-end graphics setting be an entirely remade set of assets or just upgraded capabilities (physics etc)?LT: It will have the same set of assets as the regular game, just upgraded features. Not sure exactly what though, it's still a little early to decide, I'd rather wait for us actually reaching that stretch goal!tLBP: No problem, that covered what I was interested in! Thanks for all your time - these answers have been really in depth, so I can't actually think of any additional questions! I'm really excited to see how the game develops. Good luck on the final leg of the Kickstarter, and I hope that even should you miss the goal that we haven't heard the last from you yet! I'm rootin' for ya. :)

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Connor Linning, the ES team's musician, has all the music set to no-embeds, so have a video of one of his own OTHER songs! Check out his soundcloud account, or the playlist you can find on their Kickstarter page. It's actually really nice sounding. The game's main theme sounds great.

Travel through lush environments and diverse biomes, exploring a series
of mysterious ruins, and discovering a world caught in constant conflict
between magic and technology. Magic is a gift reserved for only the
loyal followers of The Creator, while the non religious sects of society
are forced to rely upon technology in their daily lives. Upon
uncovering a mysterious artifact deep within one of the ancient ruins
scattered throughout the land, Julien and friends find themselves thrust
into the middle of this rising conflict. Can you solve the mystery of
the ancient civilizations and prevent the destruction of your own?

Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG being developed for Windows, OS X,
Linux, Android, iOS, Ouya, and even the Sega Dreamcast (not even
kidding). We fuse aspects of 16-bit classical RPGs with a highly
stylized, modern vision by using dynamic lighting, physics, and audio
engines along with swapping between 2D and 3D perspectives. Our goal is
to create the "next-generation" of the 2D RPG in terms of gameplay,
graphics, and audio. We want to reinvent and revitalize the aging genre
for a new generation of platforms, while still remaining true to the
16-bit charm of the SNES and Genesis classics that we all grew up
loving.

Those are the opening blurbs of the Elysian Shadows Kickstarter, which has been going on for two-and-a-half weeks now. A friend of mine showed me their campaign, spurred on by their own love of the Dreamcast, and I had a bunch of interesting thoughts about it. Most importantly, I noticed the distinct appearance of the art. Here's a couple pictures to illustrate.

These are some in-game screenshots presented in the KS. So if you're a veteran of my Pixel Art Lessons, or if you're just a frequent pixel-artist yourself, you might notice some stuff. I did. I then talked about it a lot on twitter, like on three separate days for an hour each, which is a lot of talking. Most of it wasn't particularly favorable, though not mean-spirited, especially in light of both of the artists being relatively new to pixel art but also in light of the struggles of making assets for game development as opposed to gallery-style work.
I had so many thoughts that I decided I should just figure out more about how it works with them from the artists themselves! So I reached out to Falco and he put me in touch with Patryk, the lead artist. My questions have also been sent to Leandro, but he's on holiday with family in Italy right now, so I'll put up that second half of the interview later.
The format for the interview was I emailed a bunch of questions, received the answers, then fired off a couple follow up questions. For smoothness purposes I'll be integrating the follow-up questions where I they make sense to be.

The Logbook Project (tLBP): So let's start simple: who are you and what is your role in the
Elysian Shadows team? I'm interested in general information as well as
your history with regard to art, and specifically pixel art.Patryk Kowalik (PK): I'm Patryk 'Imrooniel' Kowalik and I'm lead artist art ES team. Joined
close to 3 years ago, initially as concept artist but when I saw that
we're severely lack actual game assets I picked up pixel art. We all are
wearing multiple hats, so I'm also writing a ton of lore and world
building.

tLBP: What you think of pixel art as a new artist? I'm frequently involved with
the teaching of relatively new artists, so how new pixellers start out
and how they teach themselves or learn the craft is really interesting
to me.PK: I know I'll be stoned by pixel art purists for this answer, but it's
just yet another category of art styles for me. Just like vector art,
hand painted... But I think that's what allows me to come up and mix
in new things like normalmapping - there's nothing sacred for me in
pixel art, so I'm not afraid to experiment with it.

tLBP: Have you done any work outside of the assets for Elysian Shadows,
whether elsewhere or more likely just for fun? PK: Actually I've been freelancing artist for over past two years, since
high-school. I've worked on quite a few projects - most of them
never got finished unfortunately.
(here, my portfolios if you want: http://imgur.com/a/uXpIZ#0 and
http://imgur.com/a/B22KY#0)

tLBP: What sort of programs do you use for making the assets for the game?PK: Photoshop actually, I know it's not the best program for pixel art out
there, but I've been using it for past 8 years and it works. Also Spritelamp to check out normalmaps.

tLBP: Can you tell me something about how the process works between you and with the rest of the members of the team?

PK: Well... I'm making a map, post progress as I go on forum and once I'm
done with all the major points (ground, walls, and big structures) I
give it up for our level designer for testing. Because we're using a lot
of tile flipping and rotation, sometimes it is confusing to build out
of the tilesheet at first sight, so that's a time to spot it and add any
additional comments.

tLBP:I don't have experience with pixelling for game development, but I
always hear about how restrictive the time crunch can be in creating the
art. How much time do you reasonably take on a single asset (a
background, a character and their animations, whatever)? Are you often
forced to work with the first draft of a piece or do you get much chance
to go and revise before moving on?

PK:Honestly, crunch is result of poor management and planning. So far we
could work at our own pace, with only minor hiccup just before Kkickstarter - but that's because we were trying to get as much done as
possible before KS. We're not corporate, so we don't have to bother the
rigid structure and methodology: I have a general time-line as to what
should be completed until when, but it's more of an approximation. So
far we're ahead of the plan, that left me some extra time for RnD.

tLBP: It's also very encouraging to hear that you're ahead of the game when it comes to time management!
Patryk pointed me at their brand-new "Adventures In Graphic Design Chapter 1"
which illustrates how SpriteLamp and pixelling for the game works, and
it's on its own the most understandable explanation of how SpriteLamp
works I've seen yet. Check it out here:

tLBP: How indicative of the game's look are the Kickstarter photos? I gather
that the asset quality will continue to be upgraded, but is there
anything style-wise that you think will change from the current look?PK: Quite indicative. There are some things that can be easily tweaked -
perspective, scaling, shaders... But the art style itself will remain
pretty much the same. I'm actually trying out different approach as we
speak - one where shading is entirely dictated by normal map and not
colour map. The result should be similar to what we have now - after
all, I'm quite fond of what we have, except all lighting will be dynamic - not just overlay cast
shadows.

tLBP: A big change to the way pixel art works in games comes from the
lighting engine the game will be using, SpriteLamp. Can you tell me
something about how that technology works and how it changes the
creation of art assets?
In my own experience, a consistent lightsource is an important part of
making a pixel piece seem cohesive. How do you make the base art that
SpriteLamp will then work on while still trying to produce good assets
on their own?

PK: Well, normalmapping works by changing the way surface's normals interact
with dynamic lighting. With it, we can simulate a volume to some
extent, by making it in pixel art style, we can have pixel art that
dynamically reacts to light. I actually spent last 5 days painting
normalmaps by hand and trying different approaches - I'm trying to
balance how much details I'm putting into normal map and how much into
colour map. Different shaders also drastically affect the way it all
looks.
To be honest, it's not quite a pixelart any more. We're using a lot of
techniques from 3d modelling, experience from traditional painting and
illustration and apply it to pixelart. What's the result if not
pixelart? I have no idea, probably something in-between everything.tLBP: That's really interesting to me. It may not be pixel art in the
purist's sense, but that doesn't really mean anything except to the
medium's connoisseurs. Forging new ground with how pixel art is
manipulated and what it can be capable of using other techniques is
really interesting, and one of the things that most interests me about
the game.

tLBP: The game is going to be run on a variety of systems. SpriteLamp is
native to Windows, and has plans to work with Mac and Linux, but are
there special considerations you need to accommodate for it to function
on Dreamcast/Android/iOS? Should you reach the Xbox One/PS4/Wii U
stretch goals I'd imagine those consoles are strong enough to handle it,
but the relative power of the mobile OSs seems like it'd be an
obstacle.

PK: Spritelamp is just a tool for normalmap generation. Just like Photoshop -
it doesn't affect on which systems our game will be played.
But as for dynamic lighting - it all works on dreamcast. Today's mobile
devices and consoles are little bit more powerful than that, so I don't
think there will be any issues

tLBP: Still on the topic of the other operating systems, are you doing
anything special to make it look great both at the small resolutions of
mobile units as well as on large monitors or televisions with the
PC/Mac/Linux/Dreamcast? Will it be a matter of scaling the assets, or
some other solution?

PK: It's mostly scaling, and we're using "nearest neighbour" so there wont be any issue with pixel art.

tLBP: This is a long ways out, but about the Next-Gen+ stretch goal: will
that high-end graphics setting be an entirely remade set of assets or
just upgraded capabilities (physics etc)?

PK: Emm.... do you mean new-game+? That's just a different game mode...tLBP: That was in reference to a different higher-up stretch goal - as the
stretch goals are no longer visible on the KS page I don't recall what
the dollar amount was. Regardless, it was so high that it seems very
unlikely to occur, so the question is irrelevant at this point anyway.

tLBP: Do you see yourself continuing with pixel art as a medium when
you're done with the game?PK: Definitely. It remains a cheap and affordable art style (well,
relatively to everything else), so devs will still request it. Plus,
you know, if Elysian Shadows' reception is going to be good, then
we're definitely making expansion ;)

I want to thank Patryk and the Elysian Shadows team for taking their time with me and for being so openly transparent in general with all of their development on the game. Their regular livestreams and extensive documentation on Youtube is really impressive and respectable. You can see the Adventures in Graphics Design video above, but you should check the rest out. Check out the rest of their Youtube channel here.

And once again, their Kickstarter is still going here. Come support these developers!